Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy feeling proud?

lol. Good point about the vowels. Funny thing is that I asked DS tonight how many vowels he had said it had and he said "16" I guess that I wasn't paying much attention to that part as I was checking out at the doctors. And I also had to google how to spell it as that word is not typically in my vocabulary and the googled spelling was clearly wrong. I should have noticed it since DS was spelling it out loud to me all the time at a young age. Not sure where he actually got the spelling from...

Not to my ear-- I'd divide it as QUI- ET, the two vowels being the long I in QUI and the short e in ET.

I hear the qu as equivalent to kw-- not a vowel at all.

DeeDee

lol, I am from NY but lived down south for 4 years. It's pretty funny how much variety there can be on how many syllables there are in words depending on how they are pronounced. Funny story (yet completely unrelated) was when I went to a subway in TN and the woman at the counter kept saying "white or wheat?" I kept hearing her say "water wait." I was very confused and said " uh....I will have water." by about the 3rd time she said it my friend was cracking up and had to translate for me.

Ha! Shelly, I think I've had that exact same conversation!

Reminds me of when my mother heard a Canadian lady at a yard sale say she was looking for pants for her husband to "hack a boat in".

Yup. I sure am glad I'm from California where we all, like, talk, like, perfectly normal and stuff. I just, like, have a hard time understanding all them foreign speakers from other states and whatnot. Like, totally!

Love teasing my good Canuck friends aboot their idiosyncrasies.

And just so this relates somewhat to the original post, we are extremely proud of our son -- but not for his giftedness. We consider ourselves blessed (or cursed, depending on the day) for his gifts, and are proud of him when he applies himself to overcome whatever challenge he might face.

Of course, as I wrote.


That's certainly one way to hear it. I think another is as a long U sound; I've driven myself silly trying not to produce a long U sound when I say "quiet", and can't. I'm sure there are plenty of others I could easily come up with ("ai" comes to mind from long-ago days as a Scrabble player), but these things seem to be arguable by nature. And I'm sure a linguist would pop out of the woodwork to announce that "ai" is a diphthong.

kyoo-ee-et? I can't figure out how to say quiet with a long U.

GoogleDictionary says ai is either a long I sound, or a two-syllable word said like ah-ee.

The more I think about it, the harder it is to pronounce a word naturally, or to figure out which sounds I hear, and which are artifacts of an artificial pronunciation!

Koo-eye-ette. I can only imagine it being screamed thusly in a movie perhaps.
Words are always too funny if you think too closely about them.

Every time you say it, you're saying it with a long U sound (U as in "tube"). That sort of sums up my confusion about why the whole system of deciding which vowel sounds are separate has to be so messed up.

I would have thought that it was completely natural to decompose vowel sounds into their component vowel sound parts-- so "queue" would be composed of one consonant sound and two vowel sounds, roughly "k-ee-oo". This would lead to considering some letters to actually contain more than one sound, like long I-- which it actually does, to listen to it, "ah" and "ee", with a graduated transition between them. I would have considered something to be an atomic-level sound if one could make it without having to move the mouth to change the sound during utterance.

Yes, I know. That's one reason I chose it. The "ah-ee" is actually on there with a different pronunciation that stresses the boundary between the two sounds, but that doesn't mean that the one-syllable sound doesn't have those two sounds, though they're blended into each other. And unless you artificially introduce a hard break between the two sounds, the transition is always there, even if you give longer time to the sounds in isolation.


One fun thing for me is that pronouncing a word out loud enough times can make it sound alien and even wrong.

luoconu, if I say quiet like the guys from car talk would, is that about right?